As the use of payment cards and other payment instruments associated with transaction accounts increases, the amount of fraud that is attempted, often successfully, also increases. In addition, as new methods for automated and manual fraud detection and prevention are developed, fraudsters often try to develop new methods of their own, to continue perpetrating fraud. As a result, financial institutions, payment networks, merchants, and consumers are all often trying to continuously develop new automated and manual methods to prevent fraud on transaction accounts.
Fraud can be due to a payment card number being compromised, wherein the details of the card account become known to a fraudster who then uses it. When this use is in a geographic location where the cardholder is unlikely to be, a fraud alert can be used to prevent a transaction from being authorized. False denials of authorization requests can occur if a cardholder is traveling, particularly abroad to locations known for having statistically higher percentages of this type of compromised number fraud, when the same account number is used at foreign points of sale. Being aware of this, cardholders are asked to telephone the card account issuing bank to advise them of impending travel, which is not efficient, often ineffective and requires both increase human and computer processing time for the multiple format communications (e.g., voice, e-mail, etc.) that often have to be entered into another system including a payment system.
Cross-border transactions having a high fraud rate and hence most banks decline transactions if the card-holder does not set up a travel-alert. This has a heavy impact on consumers when traveling abroad. Many times the consumer's card will decline when traveling abroad due to not setting up a travel-alert. The consumer then has to deal with the cumbersome process of calling the issuer to pre-register for travel and/or finding other ways to pay, or avoiding the need to pay.
In effect, the issuer is also impacted because they lose transactions consumers would have otherwise made. In addition, the cost of call centers for travel support increases. The merchant and/or acquirer are also impacted by lost transactions and the cost of authorization for declined transactions increasing.
One effort to help aid consumers at hours when banks may not be open and in locations where banks were inconvenient or otherwise unavailable, such as in a cross-border transactions, were ATM machines. ATMs were created and spread throughout the world, enabling consumers to access account information, deposit checks or cash, withdrawal cash, and perform other aspects of account management. In many instances, ATMs read account details from a payment card, such as via a swipe of the payment card or insertion of the payment card into the ATM, and then enable the consumer to perform a variety of functions for the corresponding payment account.
However, many ATMs are associated with or in communication with a financial institution, such as one associated with a payment card provided by a consumer. However, in many instances ATMs are configured to perform only account management functions for account(s) directly corresponding to read payment card or cards, even in situations where the consumer may have additional payment accounts, beyond checking and savings, with the same financial institution.
Thus, there is a need for a technical solution that can utilize the hardware and functions of existing ATMs for use as a terminal for authentication of consumer geolocation using transaction messages.